Sometimes I do.

“Irresistible,” written and directed by Stewart, stars Steve Carell and Rose Byrne. Hopefully it’s a funny movie. There’s always this begrudging sense that black people are being granted something, when it’s white people’s lack of being able to live up to the defining words of the birth of the country that is the problem. It’s about informing on how something works so that you understand the lie’s purpose.

If it’s not two nuns and a mule, I can’t even watch it.

Have there been any positive changes, though?

Enjoying his retirement as he sees fit would probably be the easiest way to put it. I grew up in Levittown, and we learned that work does it.’’ Well, guess what? We’re incentivized for more extreme candidates, for more extreme partisanship, for more conflict and permanent campaigning, for corporate interests to have more influence on the process, not less. They’re not a rogue alien organization that came down to torment the black community.

You know, I’ve been trying to think of some precise, encapsulating question to ask you about what we’ve been witnessing over the last few weeks, and everything I was coming up with felt forced or phony. Jon Stewart’s political comedy “Irresistible” is forgoing a theatrical release and will instead debut on digital rental services in June.. Those are your SparkNotes. It’s clear you’ve got things you wanted to talk about. It never ends, and it sucks.

But not all the people in it are malevolent and active racists. That’s right. The tax code isn’t complicated because poor people have demanded that it be that way.

Is that a step in the right direction? 2020 Bustle Digital Group. Sometimes that action can speak more profoundly than a daily monologue. Now they will say that. Keep in mind, though, that all good things take time. Other days we created rotgut. What you’re talking about is looking for common ground. You need to talk to people. But what doesn’t feel ridiculous is to continue to fight for nuance and precision and solutions. What's Jon Stewart Doing Now?

The Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear in 2010, which Stewart co-hosted with Stephen Colbert.

Suddenly I’m Stubblefield. You’re always going to demonize those who disagree with you and amnesty those who agree with you. What that does is feed the narrative for people who want to use it for their own purposes. He’s well aware, though, that in this exceedingly polarized time, making a comedy that takes shots at both political parties, as ‘‘Irresistible’’ does, is an invitation to criticism. The second was that a friend of mine had run for Congress in West Virginia. But my point — that we need to look at how we treat the have-nots — is valid.’’ Though I think I am guilty of not necessarily being very clear with my intention sometimes, like with the rally.

Have your lines in the sand, but understand: Do you have a phone? You have to fight on those terms, and that’s an opportunity to define what you believe is our greatness. The right will talk about poverty a certain way, and the left will talk about poverty a different way, but poor people are still poor people. We continue to make this about the police — the how of it. It’s too easy to say: ‘‘I support this other guy.

What are the structural issues underneath the lie? ‘‘There are people on the right predisposed to say, ‘[expletive] that guy.’ ’’ Some things never change. But is Biden making a strong-enough case for why people should vote for him, as opposed to just not voting for President Trump?

Bill Murray knows it.

Stewart, right, with Bill O’Reilly on ‘‘The Daily Show’’ in 2004.

I don’t think it’s too far off base to suggest that, unintentionally or not, ‘‘The Daily Show’’ played a part in that transformation. If you say, ‘‘I know people whom I love who voted for Trump,’’ people will be like, ‘‘[Expletive] you.’’ I go, ‘‘I don’t think they’re racist.’’ ‘‘They are racist, and if they’re not racist, they’re passively participating in a racist system.’’ So am I. I think there are different ways to be in the conversation. I do know: In the same way that Trump’s recklessness is born out of experience, so is my optimism, because good people outweigh [expletive] people. And I think the root of that is the for-profit incentivization of the industrial-political complex. ‘‘The arc of moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.’’ Who’s bending it?

And sometimes you have to face the truth. But in a way, Donald Trump’s presidency has been a positive, because it shows that American democratic exceptionalism is not a birthright. What’s its character?

If you were a fan of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, you're probably still adjusting to the new guy. Are you in, America? That’s such a middle-aged-guy thing.

Twelve out of the 14 subcommittee members showed up.’’ But you’re credited for being present if you’re there for one minute!

The news didn’t become ‘‘The Daily Show,’’ because at its core, ‘‘The Daily Show’’ was a critique of the news and a critique of those systems. The one that I had is in wonderful hands and continues to elevate in a way that I couldn’t have.

So I don’t view myself as being out of the conversation: I view myself as not having a show. And the article misidentified the woman who defeated Jon Ossoff in a special congressional election. Or is it more that your intentions with the rally were misguided?

‘‘Twenty-four-hour news networks are built for one thing, and that’s 9/11.

And if we don’t address the why of that treatment, the how is just window dressing.

I learned to play drums. He even appeared in the show's opening sketch as a baseball umpire. Stewart, who is 57, has written and directed ‘‘Irresistible,’’ a political satire about a small Wisconsin town that becomes engulfed in a political spectacle when a Democratic strategist and his Republican counterpart become fixated on the larger symbolic value and bellwether potential of the local mayoral race. I think everybody would like it to be as neat as, ‘‘I’ve been thinking about this subject, and here is the manner in which I present it to you — my masterpiece.’’ But this is all part of a conversation that I started having with audiences years ago. For years, all your rhythms were dictated by the demands of ‘‘The Daily Show.’’ Was it hard to change those rhythms when you walked away? Sometimes you’d avoid that question by saying you were ‘‘just’’ a comedian. All these things coalesce to make problem-solving the antithesis of what we’ve created.

Is that part of what compelled your movie?

It can be true that you can value and admire the contribution and sacrifice that it takes to be a law-enforcement officer or an emergency medical worker in this country and yet still feel that there should be standards and accountability.

Conrad Mulcahy/Comedy Central, via Everett Collection. I miss the conversations at ‘‘The Daily Show.’’ I loved going in and sitting in that room with smart, talented people and shooting the [expletive] about the world. He’s a man who has suffered no consequences. The police are a reflection of a society. But I still believe that the root of this problem is the society that we’ve created that contains this schism, and we don’t deal with it, because we’ve outsourced our accountability to the police. If they’d taken in what we were saying, they wouldn’t be doing what they’re doing now: creating urgency through conflict. That the Trump administration has not changed its practices.

It’s really about, what is government? ‘‘How’d you come up with that brilliant tank photo idea?’’ Those guys are always wrong! The national parties spent $50 million dollars in one district in Georgia on this weird off-year congressional race. It has also made Stewart’s post-‘‘Daily Show’’ silence — apart from a few guest spots on his old friend and colleague Stephen Colbert’s show, he has been mostly out of the spotlight — more intriguing.

He seems to be getting better.’’ I was like, Yup. My perspective is, I’m trying to talk about what I believe is wrong systemically that gives us corrupted outcomes because the system is incentivized to do that. No. It’s like YouTube and Facebook: an information-laundering perpetual-radicalization machine. Therefore, you’re the problem.’’ Now, that is in no way exculpatory to the supporters of those policies or that regime.

Regardless, you might be wondering what the old host is up to now, with all that extra time on his hands. It arose from a couple things. And no matter what, Trump has defined the terms of the fight. And similarly, people are looking at entertainers, rather than politicians, as political authorities. Are we the Articles of Confederation? That’s the part of it that I probably most regret. It’s incredible. Maybe at the end you go: ‘‘You know what?

‘‘Satire’’ and ‘‘efficacy’’ are probably words that should not be in the same sentence.

What do you make of this statement that one of them posted on Twitter about a woman?’’ That would have been the majority of the coverage. Although O’Reilly pushed it pretty far. Well, you know what? Are you hopeful about what lies ahead?

The rally wasn’t about being civil. You’re talking to me; I made a stupid movie about this, but underpinning that movie is a real thing, and the real thing is the corruption and the incompetence that we don’t even think about. They’re enforcing segregation. White people lasted six weeks and then stormed a state building with rifles, shouting: ‘‘Give me liberty!

Because the view we get of the country is not accurate. Back in 2010, Stewart hosted a panel of ailing emergency workers who'd been afflicted by their work at Ground Zero in the hours and days after the twin towers collapsed.

You would have thought that somebody would have mentioned to Trump the idea of rising to greatness.

The neighbor said: ‘‘By the way, I heard your son practicing drums. To submit a letter to the editor for publication, write to. Imagine the anguish of living in a country that profited off the forced labor of your ancestors, and is still having this conversation: ‘‘Hey, do you think we should fly the flag of the people that fought to enslave your ancestors? My life became much richer. It’s as if I’d been walking around with a little toilet-paper roll cardboard tube over my eyes, to the point where I thought that was the view. It’s like the Levittown thing with Bill O’Reilly. We can’t absolve that. Stewart testifying before the House Judiciary Committee in 2019.

When I became less myopically focused, things became more fulfilling. Action is conversation, and I’ve taken more action in the last four or five years than I ever have in my life. All that can make for a less-egregious relationship between the police and people of color. Since getting out of the host's chair, however, he's made some headlines by returning to one of the most overt on-air advocacies he ever engaged in, arguing for an extension to 9/11 first responder and survivor benefits. Then, when that’s over, a defensiveness from the group that had been doing the oppressing. Recently he interviewed Kevin Hart about police brutality, Madeleine Albright about American intervention abroad and David Chang about the state of the restaurant industry. I feel like it hasn’t begun. Correction: June 15, 2020. I don’t mean that to be flip.

The moral high ground is absolutely there, but we can all achieve something higher. These older white guys who have failed almost at every turn and are still brought in as the old wise man. He knows it.

And in what's surely one of the least-expected career developments in recent memory, he appeared at the WWE event Summerslam in August, turning the course of a match by striking well-loved wrestler John Cena with a folding chair. How about on the other side? Racism is built into this system. Within the government, they’ve instead created a system to insulate themselves and propagate their own interests. My efficacy for that kind of conversation has passed.